Traitor

As a Combat Mission player I would have liked for them to release the module. But from a business perspective the decision not to release it was probably a sound one. In any case, it's hardly worth discussing since the key decisionmakers have already made up their minds. It's not like this subject hasn't already been beaten to death over the last two years.

A shame that the DLC is scrapped, but for very understandable reasons.

I think the main appeal of CMBS was the near peer/ near future setting where we could get a taste of how modern wars, or wars in the near future would be fought. The trouble with it is that potential options for a near future/near peer setting also tend to be conflicts that might very well happen in reality.

Additionally, the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that a lot of the original assumptions about modern war were incorrect, drones, loitering munitions, tactical ballistic missiles, mines, artillery, mines delivered through artillery, electronic warfare, guerilla style tactics, field improvisation (strapping everything to a MT-LB) and improvised vehicle armor all play a larger role than most people expected. While this might not be applicable to every country, I think quite a lot of it is.

Hopefully a CM3 would be designed to fully accommodate for the advancements in modern warfare.

I still want a CM game set in a near peer/ near future setting, but perhaps the next "modern" game could either use a fictional setting like in the ARMA series, or one that is extremely unlikely to happen such as China vs EU, Russia vs China, EU vs USA etc to avoid a repeat of CMBS.

A shame that the DLC is scrapped, but for very understandable reasons.

I think the main appeal of CMBS was the near peer/ near future setting where we could get a taste of how modern wars, or wars in the near future would be fought. The trouble with it is that potential options for a near future/near peer setting also tend to be conflicts that might very well happen in reality.

Additionally, the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that a lot of the original assumptions about modern war were incorrect, drones, loitering munitions, tactical ballistic missiles, mines, artillery, mines delivered through artillery, electronic warfare, guerilla style tactics, field improvisation (strapping everything to a MT-LB) and improvised vehicle armor all play a larger role than most people expected. While this might not be applicable to every country, I think quite a lot of it is.

Hopefully a CM3 would be designed to fully accommodate for the advancements in modern warfare.

I still want a CM game set in a near peer/ near future setting, but perhaps the next "modern" game could either use a fictional setting like in the ARMA series, or one that is extremely unlikely to happen such as China vs EU, Russia vs China, EU vs USA etc to avoid a repeat of CMBS.

All I can say is it's @George MC.  I would expect no less 😉.

I'm playing @George MC's Red Thunder Campaign Five Days One Summer and I'm on the 4th mission. I set up an ambush with 3 tanks in the town of Gliniszcze, which has a border of trees on all sides about 20 meters wide. Shortly after I set them up 3 Soviet tanks arrive and I dispatch them pretty quickly. After a little while I see two more approaching. They get within and 30 to 40 meters of the tree line then stop.  They then proceed to rake the entire tree line with their machine guns and main guns. This went on for about a full 10 minutes (10 turns) with them raking the whole line and concentrating on a small area in front of them with their main guns. I didn't have any units in or near the tree line.
They blasted away an opening for them then they went in through the opening they made and stopped again. They again proceeded to start shooting at the next set of trees and the houses. I didn't have anybody in the houses either. My tanks were between some houses on the main road but I had to wait for them to get in the line of fire as since they were already facing me I couldn't approach them from the front for a shot and couldn't work my way around them as there were over watch tanks that would blast me since I would have been in the open.
Eventually they worked their way into my tanks line of fire and I was able to get them both. I have never played a scenario where the designer had the tanks proactively started shooting at areas where the opponent might likely be. It's almost as they were thinking on their own. It added a bit more excitement to the game to say the least.

I've touched on the Soviet open/closed hatch fighting in another thread here, but in summary:
As has been pointed out, Soviet doctrine (don't know about modern Russian) was "fight closed up". However, the WW2 experience was that a lot of tankers realised that that just didn't work very well in practice, and stopped doing it as they got experienced. That's been a recurring theme I've seen in several Red Army tank crew autobiographies. TC arrives at his unit, fights buttoned up, is told by his crew "you'll die just as dead if a Panzer/PaK you didn't spot destroys the tank as you'll be by small arms fire", heeds said advice or doesn't and realises that yes, he's not seeing much at all.
Typically all AFVs in CM have inferior spotting with their crew turned in until thermal sights become a thing. In the WW2 titles I keep tanks unbuttoned until within roughly within 300m of enemy dismounts or built up areas. A tank with a dead TC is handicapped, but a couple of terrified survivors with a burning, exploding tank are substantially more so.

Yeah those soviets tanks can be very frightening and even those bmp too.
In schock force they often are laughable easy to spot and taken out but in cold war without thermals and proper US ifv you get to understand why it was such a leap forward.
 
I almost lost an entire M60 platoon to them once in a battle while they stayed completely hidden.
In the same battle I got to know the capabilities of the T80s and only reached a stalemate with lots of luck and some good hits from the 2 M901 you got.

😂
Even if it was 30 minutes in my 3 hour game, that would be do-able (and useful).  Otherwise you have a big chunk of metal sat in the wrong place right up to 3 hours.

The emphasis on "conventional war".  That is rather like the generals who expected horse cavalry to still be useful in WW1.

Playing the Syrians is hard. You've an army which is at least twenty years behind the US (more or less), nothing like the quality of optics and comms, and on top of that has worse soft factors on Typical settings. It's also far from impossible.

First of all, one soldier = one soldier in Combat Mission. Regular troops are identical across the board. On top of that, they'll have organisational and equipment differences (radios, optics, body armour, etc.) that will add up to a larger difference over time.

Pretty much no Syrian armour can penetrate an Abrams from the front. All of them can take out one from the side. This means that there's a good argument to either use the best possible armour (T-90/T-72 TURMS-T) with enhanced spotting, or use the worst possible armour available (and mostly fight unbuttoned)
It also means that you need to distribute your fires. Two tank platoons in the same location can be faced frontally by an Abrams. Two platoons in different locations can't, and with good co-ordination can get flanking shots and kills. Exactly the same thinking applies to ATGMs - trading off decreased C2 for gaining an advantage through positioning.


Syrian/Soviet doctrine is all about specialisation. Imagine going up against a Bradley platoon - this will have superiors optics, better armour than your IFV's, TOW missiles, dismounted Javelins, etc. The Bradley overmatches pretty much everything in the Syrian arsenal, so to get past that requires some careful thought.

Your basic Soviet attack is extensive, active recon, followed by preliminary bombardment, followed by an attack in line with armour (in the open anyway), followed by an attack in line with mechanised infantry. The entire structure is built around overwhelming force and numbers at the sharp end - the organisation encourages you to use larger forces than you with Blufor.

In the context of the Bradley Platoon then, each part of your force needs to deal with an element of theirs - your mortars need to suppress or kill their dismounted ATGMs, your armour needs to kill their Bradleys, and your infantry need to mop up. Getting this all to work together is hard, much more difficult than playing the US.
 
Poor quality troops can be expected to do precisely one thing in the battle. This means that you need to plan such that the troops can have their moment, and if they survive afterwards, that's a bonus.

IFV doctrine is to use the BMP as part of the squad firepower. If you don't, you're intentionally crippling yourself, with an undermanned and undergunned unit. BMPs also explode when you look at them funny, which means that you need to use hull-down positions, and great recon before you leap into contact.

Soviet thinking around reconnaissance put more emphasis on recon by force than the West. The Motor rifle recon platoon are two BMPs, with an AT-4, an HQ and two scout units. The correct way to use this in a CM perspective is to be bold and aggressive - construct attacks on forward suspected positions, and try to maintain cover with a support element (either the second BMP, or the BMPs covering the dismounted units. This is far more likely to risk losing the recon platoon, but it will also reveal far more about the enemy, faster, which is what you need to achieve.
 
Basically... it's hard, yes. It's supposed to be, since CMSF is about modern asymmetrical warfare. 
Ideal scenario design can balance this with Preserve objectives, or harsh penalties for losing blue forces, but it's tough.

The Syrian Airborne & Special Forces still only carry 100 MG rounds as standard.

Apologies, I'm not aware of that rule, my bad.

But is necroing bug threads a problem if the bug is still present in the game? Would probably be neater than making a new thread describing an identical issue.

With only one pair of NV goggles spotting should take much longer as only one guy is actually seeing anything. Same is with binoculars just not as crucial maybe because in daylight every soldiers can see at least to a certain distance.
 
This one is easy to compare: Just take british/Common wealth infantry in the ww2 era for example. Normal infantry squads dont come with any binoculars at all. The next one to have a pair would be the platoon leader.
Spotting at farther distances or revealing enemy troops in prepared positions or concealment is very decreased in comparison to a german or US squad for example.
Target acquisition for the rest of the squad members however should be at an instant more or less. So as soon as the squad leader has a solid spot, all the soldiers that have a line of fire, should open up closely after. Though I dont know how much impact on the accuracy it has when there are no additional nvg.
If the Commander then dies the goggles/binculars are gone and so the spotting decreases further, thats right.
But if you buddy aid said commander you have the possibility to regain the equipment and so regain some spotting capabilities.
 

True, warfare is changing, especially with the rise of new technologies like drones. However, I expect most militaries to be rapidly developing anti-drone technology, jammers and the like so the effectiveness of cheap commercial off the shelf drones will greatly diminish and all remaining drones in warfare will need to be hardened in some way.

In a conventional war, the US military does currently dominate over any potential opposition, but it remains to be seen if this lead will last. That's why I think the near future/near peer setting is an important one to model in wargames, sure, it's hypothetical in nature, but we can't assume that the US military will remain peerless 10, 20 or 30 years in the future and it is useful to simulate how well it does against an equivalent foe.

That's true, but the game was never meant to depict a real conflict, it was always intended to be a hypothetical scenario, set in the near future against a near peer enemy. When the game was released it was clear that it was meant to represent a hypothetical future conflict, in hindsight given how reality played out differently it might have been a better idea to set the game in 2027 instead of 2017 in order to get the same perspective.

Obviously no military in the world is truly an equivalent to the US army, but that's the suspension of disbelief required in order to have a game with a near future/near peer scenario (It is still useful to model what conventional modern warfare against a similarly equipped enemy looks like). A fully realistic game would probably just play like Shock Force 2 again with the US army stomping any opposition with ease, but that won't be very useful when trying to see how well the US army would do against a broadly equivalent enemy.

Perhaps a realistic modern scenario (without being set in the near future where you can write into the backstory that an adversary greatly beefed up their military and adopted new equipment) that doesn't just devolve into Shock Force 3 would require the US army to not be involved due to the sheer power disparity making the conflict no longer a near-peer one. However, the US army is basically required for a modern war game to sell well, thus the only real way to depict a near peer scenario is to have a hypothetical conflict where the enemy military is better equipped than in reality and have the audience suspend their disbelief.

A fictional setting doesn't mean it can't be based in reality, you can have fictional alliances of real countries like they did in ARMA, where there's a Chinese-Iranian led alliance doing a proxy war with NATO in a fictional Southern European country. It sounds plausible-ish but there's no such alliance in reality (yet) so there's no risk of it turning into a real conflict in the short term.
 
I don't think you can eliminate the risk, but there are ways to minimize it, such as having the game take place a decade or two in the future where you have a bit more freedom in the geopolitical backstory. A EU vs USA scenario might not be as ridiculous if there's 10-20 years of backstory to get to that point: democratic backsliding, radical political parties and leaders seizing power, new alliances being forged with traditional adversarial countries, increasing resource scarcity and certain flashpoint locations (maybe even a fictional flashpoint location) can create a reasonably plausible scenario where such a conflict can happen. It depends on the writing and how far in the future you are willing to go, we have to remember that current global alliances are not set in stone.

Or there can also be realistic-sounding scenarios that are extremely unlikely to ever happen, such as China vs Japan, with the potential involvement of Russia, North Korea, South Korea, USA and maybe Iran or select EU countries as expansions (North Korea vs South Korea directly is too risky of a title in my opinion). Such a scenario is probably impossible in real life, but you wouldn't have to suspend too much disbelief for it.

Soviet and Russian vehicles have really bad spotting when buttoned up, I know it's against doctrine but I like to open them up whenever possible when outside of small arms range especially in the modern games as whoever gets the first spot and fires first usually has the advantage. The only exception is if the vehicle has a CITV, then I think the spotting is good enough to stay buttoned up.

Yes, it’s too bad the expansion pack is dead, there was a lot of interesting stuff in there, although I understand BFC’s decision.
Now CMBS itself is not dead, the game still works fine. There are some mistakes since a lot of stuff had to be guessed at, but on the whole it is pretty accurate.
Now in terms of simulating the current war, that can actually be done as well, you can build immense minefields, fortified lines, play around with morale/command capacity, give both sides lots of UAVs, etc.
You can also easily upgrade UKR forces. The scenario editor is flexible enough that you can easily add U.S. weapons to UKR units. I have done various quick and dirty scenarios and UKR forces with Abrams, Bradleys, U.S. artillery and drones are VERY capable. Unfortunately, any U.S. vehicle you add to UKR forces will still show up as U.S. and speak English, but that is a minor point. Hopefully, that could be addressed by modders.
All CMx2 games are ultimately sandbox games and you can do a lot with them.

While I agree that the methodology in those examples are ridiculous, I don't think that using Soviet documents is automatically a bad idea, not that you were saying that was the case of course, I understood you as saying that he cherry picks the finding from the studies that are in line with his pre-existing beliefs without considering the proper context etc, but I just felt like I should expand on the point of Soviet sources.

When it comes to sources and documents from non-allied states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, there is a tendency to dismiss all the data as inherently unreliable which isn't necessarily the case. After all, these countries were doing tests to collect data for their own military development, there is an incentive to collect accurate data that can help when designing their next tank or planning out future tank doctrine. It's a generally a bad idea for engineers to make up nonsense test results to send back to the ministry knowing that that bogus data will be used to design the next generation of tanks, that would ironically be much more deserving of punishment than simply reporting that the current equipment isn't up to snuff.

What people should be looking at is the type of sources. Official press releases, state news, personal accounts, biographies and anything else intended for public consumption are not always the most reliable of sources and can include a great deal of propaganda, I would take them with a grain of salt even if they were written by the Allies. However, a declassified technical report meant for internal consumption within the ministry of defense can generally be assumed to be relatively accurate, in this case they need accurate data, they are perfectly capable of conducting accurate tests and there's no real incentive to make stuff up if the data was not meant to be publicly released. Like you mentioned, the Soviet helmet report did indicate that no usable conclusion could be drawn due to the flawed methodology, indicating that they were actually trying to collect usable data instead of just trying to show that their equipment was the best. For WW2 primary sources a good rule of thumb is that primary sources intended for internal consumption within the government or military tend to be at least fairly accurate as that was the information which the decision makers relied upon to fight the war, while primary sources intended for the general public can generally be assumed to include elements of propaganda.

I don't know much about this Samsonov guy in particular, but from what I've read in this thread he translates Soviet primary sources, but tends to draw flawed conclusions from them. In this case, my suggestion would be to take his conclusions with a grain of salt and for people to look at the translated primary sources instead, consider the context in which those sources were written to gauge their reliability and draw their own conclusions from the sources.

I'll speculate it's because if it was there, players would want to use it for its primary purpose, which was towing various larger guns, which isn't a game feature.
Thoughts?
 

I believe they were pretty rare but yeah I'd love to have these bad boys in the series eventually. 

I believe this will be the case too.

While WW2 will always retain a certain level of popularity due to its sheer scale and historical significance, I think there's a growing interest in other time periods among wargamers, the trends will be interesting to observe.

I would absolutely love a new modern/near future title now that CMBS is shelved. Maybe a solution to avoid another CMBS situation is to go even further into the future ARMA 3 style and have hypothetical alliances duke it out in 2050 over a conflict that doesn't exist yet? Sure, it would be even more speculative than any previous CM titles, but the near future setting is already speculative by nature, and it will give the designers much more freedom in the TO&E.

Or the setting could just be something that is extremely unlikely to happen in real life, such as Russia vs China, EU vs USA etc and we would just have to suspend our disbelief for the extremely convoluted backstory that would be required for it to happen 😄

Whatever is it, I am looking forward to whatever non beaten to death setting you guys have in mind for future games🙂

Will there be another CM game made which will allow people to play with modern TOEs?
WW2 is all well-and-good, but it is nice to play with equipment that was invented less than a century ago.

it's my favourite Cm game and my heart bleeds when I see the state it's in